ASSOCIATIVE PLURAL IN TATAR: COMMUNICATION FACTORS AND LEXICAL CLASSES

Abstract

Associative Plural is the communicative and grammatical mechanism to designate open classes of objects naming explicitly given prototypical (focal) representative and not named but alluded members. Referents of the Associative Plural form a set of members having conceptually or adjacently common features. Inexplicit referents are decoded by means of context or situation of communication and rely upon the knowledge about the external world of the speaker and the hearer.

Phenomenon of the Associative Plural is well described from the typological perspective; nevertheless it remains insufficiently studied on the data of particular languages. Researchers say that Associative Plural is observed on material of two basic lexical classes – personal names and terms of kinship. In Tatar prototypical manifestations of the Associative Plural are well fit in the canvas proposed by the typologists, nevertheless empirical data, including corpus evidences, show that the phenomenon is not limited by the mentioned lexical classes and it may be found in a much broader lexical material.

We pay special attention to the factors of communication − unofficial oral speech, comparable social status of the communicants, and shared knowledge of the external words, which enables to adequately decode inexplicit referents.

We consider different lexical classes that allow the forms of the Associative Plural, and pay special attention to toponyms and names of body parts. We conclude also that different forms of Plural in Tatar have no clear boundaries and often the context does not allow to make an unambiguous conclusion what type of the Plural us used – the additive, the associative or the expressive one.

This study is based on semantic and contextual analysis of lexical items supplied with some information on statistical distribution of related phenomena in Tatar corpus.